Dig For Victoria

Victorian gardeners may have looked to the past or to other countries for their inspiration, but their influence can still be seen in gardens big and small today, says Mark Griffiths

- Mark Griffiths

ON new Year’s Day 1837, the explorer Robert Schomburgk was being paddled down the River Berbice, in British Guiana, when he encountered what he would later describe as ‘A vegetable wonder!’. It was a waterlily with gigantic leaves each at least 6ft across. Among them, there bobbed proportionately large flowers ‘consisting of many hundred petals, passing in alternate tints from pure white to rose and pink’.

Later that year, it fell to John Lindley of the Horticultural Society of London to name this lovely leviathan. The task was easy—he chose the name on everyone’s lips, that of Britain’s new sovereign, who had succeeded to the throne in June. Lindley called the waterlily Victoria regia.

In 1849, the nation was awed when Joseph Paxton, the Duke of Devonshire’s brilliant gardener, coaxed Victoria into bloom in a heated pool house he’d designed for the purpose. In 1851, the world was astounded by a still more sensational Paxton design: the Crystal Palace, whose vast glass spans he’d based on the waterlily’s leaf structure.

Lindley’s naming of Victoria proved to be prescient. There could be no better emblem of the dynamism and social importance of Victorian horticulture than this exotic species, which gripped the public, inspired marvels of engineering and helped a gifted gardener to soar.